Home
Creators
Search Recent Random
Posts
Search DMs Popular Hash Lookup Tags Random
Importer
Import FAQ
Register Favorites Keys Review DMs Logout
Community
Telegram ThePornDude
Home Creators Posts Import Register Favorites Logout

/148/ Three Articles (September) (Patreon)

Published:
2020-09-22 06:00:04
Imported:
2026-06
Tags:

Downloads

Content

On Brexit negotiations and state aid; on pandemic policies and confirmation bias; and on Beethoven and access to high culture.

Readings:

Of moonshots and bus subsidies: How state aid became a Brexit deal-breaker, The Economist (attached in patreon)

Sweden’s Covid-19 experiment holds a worldwide warning, Wolfgang Münchau, FT (attached in patreon)

Why are we racialising Beethoven, Ralph Leonard, Unherd

Additional referenced pieces:

Anders Tegnell and the Swedish Covid experiment, FT

We Need a Radically Different Approach to the Pandemic and Our Economy as a Whole, Katherine Yik & Martin Kulldorff, Jacobin

Files

Comments

Shatner's Bassoon

Edifying as ever. On the Covid-19 article: agreed, agnosticism as to public health policy is advisable, especially for those of us who know f**k all about public health. One question I'd love to hear your opinions on is what you think Covid-19 means for capitalism in the long run. A lockdown is in effect a state sanctioned general strike - the immediate hit is to business owners, large or small, and in the natural course of things that hit will be passed on to employees, in the form of redundancies and pay cuts, etc. So far most governments seem to have staved off the worst of it through furlough schemes and such like, but for how long will they be able to afford this? What if a vaccine never appears, or if it turns out you can catch Covid more than once, and so going for herd immunity is not an option? Surely an alternative mode of the production and distribution of the necessaries of life would be required, in the long-term, if politically unacceptable levels of unemployment and death are to be avoided?

Shatner's Bassoon

How nice of you to reply - parasocialism at its best! As always, but especially this time, I look forward to the next instalment of ABB...

Mary

Great to see some debate re Covid/lockdown. I'm quite surprised how little it has featured as a topic of serious analysis on the left. It was disappointing to hear dismissive comments made about the anti-lockdown movement in Germany. It can hardly be written off as a far right '5G conspiracy' type of movement while the likes of Wolfgang Wodarg and even Robert F Kennedy Jr feature as prominent leaders. In case you guys missed it, here was Kennedy's opening speech at the most recent (extremely large) protest: "The newspapers in the US are claiming I came to Berlin to speak to 5000 Nazis and when I will return, they will write I spoke to 8000 Nazis. But when I look at the crowd, I see no Nazis. I see people who want real democracy and freedom!…I look at this crowd and see all the flags of Europe! I see people of every color, every religion, and every political party. All they care is about human dignity, about children‘s health and political freedom, which is the opposite of Nazism."

AM

First time/long time. I'm an infectious diseases doctor from sunny Melbourne. This was a very frustrating episode to listen to! Your engagement with the politics of COVID responses is undermined by scientific illiteracy and it's such a waste of important critique. The is overwhelming evidence that COVID causes excess death - older, poorer people with co-morbidities are more at risk. Young, healthy people die too. Vague references to ‘pre-existing health problems’ (do these deaths matter less?) or claims of falsified death rates is ignorant, but more than that it’s unnecessary. The response to a pandemic is essentially social and political, as you rightly say, why muddy that with easily falsifiable claims that seem to aim to minimise the impact of the disease? There is no need, and these are not the terms of the argument you’re making.

kd

man, i love george lol